


weightless

by uniformly (scramjets)



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Episode: The Last Patrol, Fic for Victory 2k15, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 17:39:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3905044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scramjets/pseuds/uniformly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Webster returns to Easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FooFighter0234](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FooFighter0234/gifts).



> Prompt: _An angsty story with Webster and Liebgott set in Haguenau._
> 
> Please note: there is a bit of gore involved with the story, but! It's removed from the 'clean' version, ie. Chapter 1. Please avoid Chapter 2 if you don't have the stomach for gore. M rating applies to that specific chapter.
> 
> A million and three thanks to Shannon and Skew for looking this over for me!

Webster knows that a bullet in the meat of the shoulder writes a man off to limited mobility and a lifetime of agony, whether or not he has the privilege of keeping his arm. 

Webster also knows that a shot to the leg can slice the femoral artery and bleed a man out in minutes, maybe long enough for a shot of morphine to kick in before the spirit is kicked out.

Webster knows most of all that the memory of being shot is tangled up in the greater picture of Market Garden. The elegant curve of the bullet lost to the slew of sounds and the taste of dirt; his fingers dug into farmland, bits of brick and stone that ping off his helmet as he scrambles with the weight of his rifle slung across his body or grasped between his hands, the metal warm.

It had taken a second for the wedge of pain in his thigh to register – the burn that had skimmed through the bulk of his leg and caused it to fold beneath him. 

“They got me,” he had said.

-

Webster writes, intends to make it a living. He understands the rules of writing and knows when something is trite. 

‘They got me’ is trite, and Webster is going to have to live with the fact that it was the first thing out of his mouth regardless. 

-

The second time he asks for a pen and paper, he gets told that they are rationed.

-

The Purple Heart that he receives is kept folded in a scrap of cloth together with the rest of his things. He makes a note of it, and tucks it away with all the other mental notes and tallies he keeps while recovering.

-

The journey back to Easy Company is simple in as much as it isn’t. Webster requests to be transferred back, and does it again. And again. 

-

What he hears of Bastogne comes in pieces. Initially, it’s all glories – the stuff the States would be getting. The Battered Bastards of Bastogne, and it sends a ripple of pride through Webster to be attached to Easy; one small part of the greater picture, even if he hadn’t been there. He’s keen to get back.

Haguenau is a rough ride. Webster hitches where he can. Winter has settled in the France, coming in as sleet that turns quickly into brown sludge. One of the trucks he’s a passenger on gets bogged down, and the driver swears as he crunches through the gears while the rear wheels slough through the mud and spray shit everywhere. 

In the end, Webster grabs a shovel and digs the wheels out, the first real test of the ability of his leg and he’s pleased it doesn’t do much more than ache – less than that, a suggestion of pain, a warmth that hums through scar tissue.

The trickle of vehicles and men become a stream once they hit the borders of Haguenau. Webster watches it ebb and flow through the township, intent, memorising what he can while he’s still out of tools to write with. 

It’s difficult to tamp down on the thrill of reuniting with Easy. Did Hoob get his Luger? Shit, how’s Toye been keeping up? The replacements who’d been through Market Garden, they’d be considered one of Easy now. He wonders what Babe’s been up to, or if Garcia is still around and if his face has thinned from youth yet. He looked too goddamn young.

Some of the shine is buffed off with the reception Webster receives. He’d ignored the frayed edges of the men he had trained with, who he ran up and down Mt. Currahee with, a little like ants in the grand scheme of things. 

There are pieces and parts of them left somewhere in Bastogne, or that they are still salvaging while they sit, slumped, swaying with the movement of the truck in a way that had less to do with being relaxed and more to do with – and this Webster accounts for later: defeat. Cold. Bastogne.

But the quiet shame doesn’t curl in his gut until later, so Webster’s all goddamn smiles as he tips his head back and searches for familiar faces, looks out for the spark of recognition and a similar excitement for his return. Shit, he had _missed_ these men. There’s a couple less than he was expecting, but they slide into a column marked for later as he picks the platoon out – sees beyond the grime and dirt and weariness, because he knows them best as their 1944 selves; new on the battlefield and invincible. And so Webster acts like that, too. 

He asks, “Where are the rest of the guys?” and gets told, “This is everybody.”

He asks, “What about Hoobler, where’s he?” and gets ignored.

A part of Webster is aware that these are the wrong questions to demand and that they’ll get him nowhere. It’s that part of Webster who feels self-conscious, that 1944 self who is looking at these men in 1945, their uniforms worn and ruined where his are crisp and clean. 

He falters, all of a sudden aware of the effort it takes to lift his boots through the mud; the rattle of the chassis of the truck he’s trailing after. How cold his fingers are in his neat woollen cut-offs and how his breath leaves his lungs and burns through his sinuses.

There’s an uncharacteristic lack of heat in the way Cobb dismisses him and Webster grabs his kit again, slides it from the tray of the truck and lets it bounce off against his leg, where his thigh doesn’t protest. He hitches it up on his shoulder and the strap cuts into his palm. It’s buffered by his glove, but is the only thing that grounds him. 

Luz had called after him that it had been four months. Webster had only caught it, some unimportant thing, like how he would leave home and his mother would call out a time to be back by. But now he’s acutely aware of it – the stretch of four months, and Webster lays it out: enough time for the end of summer to bleed into winter. Enough time for him to heal and come back. 

Enough time for his start as a Toccoa man amount to nothing after Bastogne.

Webster scrapes his nerves together and approaches 2nd Platoon.

-

It’s easier to sink back into the role of an observer than it is to sink back into Easy; those who don’t outright rib him gloss over him, and Webster doesn’t look deep enough to figure out which aches more. Not with the hurts the other men wear around him, the invisible ones, raw and festering that makes the sting of being treated like a replacement insubstantial.

To watch and to listen is part of his nature. He has pages of notes from Toccoa up to Market Garden, sent home where he could, save for a couple of thin books of scuffed and furry pages where he had thumbed through over and over. Those are buried at the bottom of his kit, a flat rectangle that he takes care to keep out of water despite being carefully wrapped. 

He heads to the CP for Easy and sits where he is told, waits where he’s told to wait; watches for what has changed, and catalogues how they’ve done so in tidy notes in his head. 

Lipton’s sick – simple one to begin with – slung in a couch that’s as weary as he is and bundled beneath blankets. Lipton looks thinner. His lips are a pale smear on a paler backdrop that’s punctuated by the shadow of his eyes, but there’s an aspect to him that Webster doesn’t recognise – a sense of familiarity and ease with the authority he wields as he confers with Speirs about a patrol he’s probably not supposed to know about.

Malarkey jerks abruptly into Webster’s thoughts as Lipton and Speirs pick out the men for the patrol. How Malarkey had been on the truck – on the fast track for a battlefield commission while barely upright with a hand hoisted around the canopy frame. Webster never knew that he could come ragged.

-

“Hey, Web.”

 _Web_ is something he hasn’t been called in four months, and the way Liebgott says it hauls Webster back to a time where he was part of the fold instead of the one looking in on it. _Web_ takes him back to Toccoa with the sun beating down against his neck, sweat beading against his temples and the worst thing being a double run up Mt. Currahee with Sobel snapping at their heels.

Liebgott’s physical, all rough handling to go along with his sharp features and sharper mouth, and Webster knows what he’s after even before Liebgott’s managed to drag him across the room to the loose privacy of bunks where the others are waiting.

Webster glances across the room which serves as the HQ for Easy White where Lt. Jones and Malarkey talk, framed by the windows (Malarkey, who is not receiving a commission, as it turns out. It had stung Webster to be wrong, but he had set his jaw in response to the look Lt. Jones had shot him. Jones embarrassed because he’s trying to prove himself, too). 

The room reminds Webster of his grandmother’s house. Small and square, beds tucked away in corners. Webster remembers watching the dust motes weave in and out of the sunlight, but the memory fades and all that comes through the windows is the pale wash-out of early afternoon in Haguenau. 

“So,” Liebgott says once everything has been said about Lt. Jones. It’s not much. “What do you know about this patrol thing.” Across the river that divides Haguenau for a prisoner run, Webster’s head fills in. It barely qualifies as a question.

Liebgott’s face is shadowed and Webster wonders how many _angles_ a person can have before he says, “Nothing,” like he can be convincing about it. 

And Liebgott scoffs.

-

It’s harder to sink into the role of an observer when people won’t let him. 

Liebgott and Webster had never been especially close. Webster can’t imagine what it would be like to share a drink with him. He can’t come up with a topic that they would discuss, or any other similarities they have aside from the war and a proficiency in German. 

So it’s strange when Liebgott always happens to be _right there_ , like he’s taken a personal affront to Webster and needs to be at arm’s length to give him shit.

Winters and Nixon have just left the room, leaving the sixteen of them who are now officially on the patrol.

Webster turns the mission over in his head, starting from the first snatches he’d heard from Lipton and Speirs. It will be his first real action since returning to the lines and it’s going to be across a river at 1am under a full moon for a prisoner run. 

Liebgott says, from where he’s lounged on a chair, “A little German?” And then, “He’s as good as I am.”

It continues when Webster heads downstairs to catch Sgt. Martin – who is leading the patrol – to point out, “Sir, there are two translators. We only need 15 men and there are 16 of us.”

Sgt. Martin stares for a long, hard moment and says, “Liebgott?” as Liebgott walks by, “d’you wanna sit this one out?”

Liebgott maintains eye contact with Webster and departs with a smirk and a wink that’s as sharp as any other part of him.

The latter frustrates Webster because, at the right angle, it comes across as volunteering. His self-appointed role in the war is to watch and to write, even if he still lacks the tools, and it won’t be a recount of a layman’s war if he’s volunteering.

-

It comes to a head that night, in the space between being attached to the patrol and 1am, where Liebgott finds him and wraps a hand around Webster’s forearm to jerk him close. Webster had left the room for something he can’t even remember, now caught between latent anger and outright confusion when Liebgott glares at him from half shadows.

“Don’t fuck this up, Web,” Liebgott says.

Webster tells him, voice steadier than he thought it would be: “I won’t.”

“I mean it,” Liebgott says, this time in German. His fingers dig into the heavy fabric of Webster’s jacket, and Webster says, “Ich werde nicht.”

The moment drags and then Liebgott snorts as he shoves Webster away and continues down the hall. Webster watches until the shadows close around him.

-

The patrol results in one casualty and two prisoners.

Jackson dies and Webster accidentally catches Liebgott’s eyes while he’s still crouched over Jackson’s body and he’s grounded when Liebgott looks only slightly steadier than Webster feels. 

Liebgott nods, a scarcely existent up-and-down, and Webster breathes before he draws his shaking hand from where it’s cupped against Jackson’s still-warm cheek. He doesn’t clench his fist, but it’s a close thing. 

Quiet settles in an unsettled and ill-fitting silence, and the only thing that Webster’s aware of is the rough inhale-exhale of the men around him and the sharp, unstable focus on Liebgott’s face. A moment for Jackson. 

-

“He was twenty,” Webster says, later. He wonders what time it is and if dawn is close. He wants the night to be over. His nerves are frayed, but there’s a sense of elation that comes with surviving – the leftover adrenaline that courses through his veins that says, _I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive_.

The high is followed by the low, and Webster says again, “Twenty,” out loud, as if being three years older is by any way significant. 

Across the room, Liebgott makes a noise that could be an agreement or a sign to shut up before he falls silent. 

Webster lets the quiet gather as he stares at his hands. His fingers are long and calloused and his palms are square and flat. Earlier, he had been assembling a detonation device and now he’s cupping shadows. Later, he’ll transcribe the night into whatever notebook he’ll scrounge from somewhere. Webster sets his hands on top of the sheet he’s under, curled on the bed he had claimed (hours) a lifetime ago. The room feels chilly and he’s the only one beneath heaped blankets.

“You did good,” Liebgott says, finally.

Webster exhales and says, “Danke.”


	2. Original

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extended version. Warning for gore.

The man beside him is missing most of his jaw; a hollow, empty space carved between the lobe of his ear to where it curves off in meat and sinew around the chin. His breathing rattles, a wet, laboured _inhale_ -hold- _exhale_. 

Webster hates it when he coughs, because it sounds like it’s going to be his last. Like it’s going to kill him, but then Webster wakes up one morning and the man is gone, the yellow and red speckled sheets replaced with a crisp set that have been washed too often to be considered white. 

-

He requests for a pen and paper and the nurse on duty says she’ll bring him over something in a minute, and then forgets when Webster gets a new bedside neighbour who has been shot in the chest and in the shoulder, but who breathes quieter at night. 

-

Webster knows that a bullet in the meat of the shoulder writes a man off to limited mobility and a lifetime of agony, whether or not he has the privilege of keeping his arm. 

Webster also knows that a shot to the leg can slice the femoral artery and bleed a man out in minutes, maybe long enough for a shot of morphine to kick in before the spirit is kicked out.

Webster knows most of all that the memory of being shot is tangled up in the greater picture of Market Garden. The elegant curve of the bullet lost to the slew of sounds and the taste of dirt; his fingers dug into farmland, bits of brick and stone that ping off his helmet as he scrambles with the weight of his rifle slung across his body or grasped between his hands, the metal warm.

It had taken a second for the wedge of pain in his thigh to register – the burn that had skimmed through the bulk of his leg and caused it to fold beneath him. 

“They got me,” he had said.

-

Webster writes, intends to make it a living. He understands the rules of writing and knows when something is trite. 

‘They got me’ is trite, and Webster is going to have to live with the fact that it was the first thing out of his mouth regardless. 

-

The second time he asks for a pen and paper, he gets told that they are rationed.

-

The Purple Heart that he receives is kept folded in a scrap of cloth together with the rest of his things. He makes a note of it, and tucks it away with all the other mental notes and tallies he keeps while recovering.

-

His bedside neighbour gets replaced with another man whose feet have rotted off.

-

The journey back to Easy Company is simple in as much as it isn’t. Webster requests to be transferred back, and does it again. And again. 

-

What he hears of Bastogne comes in pieces. Initially, it’s all glories – the stuff the States would be getting. The Battered Bastards of Bastogne, and it sends a ripple of pride through Webster to be attached to Easy; one small part of the greater picture, even if he hadn’t been there. He’s keen to get back.

Haguenau is a rough ride. Webster hitches where he can. Winter has settled in the France, coming in as sleet that turns quickly into brown sludge. One of the trucks he’s a passenger on gets bogged down, and the driver swears as he crunches through the gears while the rear wheels slough through the mud and spray shit everywhere. 

In the end, Webster grabs a shovel and digs the wheels out, the first real test of the ability of his leg and he’s pleased it doesn’t do much more than ache – less than that, a suggestion of pain, a warmth that hums through scar tissue.

The trickle of vehicles and men become a stream once they hit the borders of Haguenau. Webster watches it ebb and flow through the township, intent, memorising what he can while he’s still out of tools to write with. 

It’s difficult to tamp down on the thrill of reuniting with Easy. Did Hoob get his Luger? Shit, how’s Toye been keeping up? The replacements who’d been through Market Garden, they’d be considered one of Easy now. He wonders what Babe’s been up to, or if Garcia is still around and if his face has thinned from youth yet. He looked too goddamn young.

Some of the shine is buffed off with the reception Webster receives. He’d ignored the frayed edges of the men he had trained with, who he ran up and down Mt. Currahee with, a little like ants in the grand scheme of things. 

There are pieces and parts of them left somewhere in Bastogne, or that they are still salvaging while they sit, slumped, swaying with the movement of the truck in a way that had less to do with being relaxed and more to do with – and this Webster accounts for later: defeat. Cold. Bastogne.

But the quiet shame doesn’t curl in his gut until later, so Webster’s all goddamn smiles as he tips his head back and searches for familiar faces, looks out for the spark of recognition and a similar excitement for his return. Shit, he had _missed_ these men. There’s a couple less than he was expecting, but they slide into a column marked for later as he picks the platoon out – sees beyond the grime and dirt and weariness, because he knows them best as their 1944 selves; new on the battlefield and invincible. And so Webster acts like that, too. 

He asks, “Where are the rest of the guys?” and gets told, “This is everybody.”

He asks, “What about Hoobler, where’s he?” and gets ignored.

A part of Webster is aware that these are the wrong questions to demand and that they’ll get him nowhere. It’s that part of Webster who feels self-conscious, that 1944 self who is looking at these men in 1945, their uniforms worn and ruined where his are crisp and clean. 

He falters, all of a sudden aware of the effort it takes to lift his boots through the mud; the rattle of the chassis of the truck he’s trailing after. How cold his fingers are in his neat woollen cut-offs and how his breath leaves his lungs and burns through his sinuses.

There’s an uncharacteristic lack of heat in the way Cobb dismisses him and Webster grabs his kit again, slides it from the tray of the truck and lets it bounce off against his leg, where his thigh doesn’t protest. He hitches it up on his shoulder and the strap cuts into his palm. It’s buffered by his glove, but is the only thing that grounds him. 

Luz had called after him that it had been four months. Webster had only caught it, some unimportant thing, like how he would leave home and his mother would call out a time to be back by. But now he’s acutely aware of it – the stretch of four months, and Webster lays it out: enough time for the end of summer to bleed into winter. Enough time for him to heal and come back. 

Enough time for his start as a Toccoa man amount to nothing after Bastogne.

Webster scrapes his nerves together and approaches 2nd Platoon.

-

It’s easier to sink back into the role of an observer than it is to sink back into Easy; those who don’t outright rib him gloss over him, and Webster doesn’t look deep enough to figure out which aches more. Not with the hurts the other men wear around him, the invisible ones, raw and festering that makes the sting of being treated like a replacement insubstantial.

To watch and to listen is part of his nature. He has pages of notes from Toccoa up to Market Garden, sent home where he could, save for a couple of thin books of scuffed and furry pages where he had thumbed through over and over. Those are buried at the bottom of his kit, a flat rectangle that he takes care to keep out of water despite being carefully wrapped. 

He heads to the CP for Easy and sits where he is told, waits where he’s told to wait; watches for what has changed, and catalogues how they’ve done so in tidy notes in his head. 

Lipton’s sick – simple one to begin with – slung in a couch that’s as weary as he is and bundled beneath blankets. Lipton looks thinner. His lips are a pale smear on a paler backdrop that’s punctuated by the shadow of his eyes, but there’s an aspect to him that Webster doesn’t recognise – a sense of familiarity and ease with the authority he wields as he confers with Speirs about a patrol he’s probably not supposed to know about.

Malarkey jerks abruptly into Webster’s thoughts as Lipton and Speirs pick out the men for the patrol. How Malarkey had been on the truck – on the fast track for a battlefield commission while barely upright with a hand hoisted around the canopy frame. Webster never knew that he could come ragged.

-

“Hey, Web.”

_Web_ is something he hasn’t been called in four months, and the way Liebgott says it hauls Webster back to a time where he was part of the fold instead of the one looking in on it. _Web_ takes him back to Toccoa with the sun beating down against his neck, sweat beading against his temples and the worst thing being a double run up Mt. Currahee with Sobel snapping at their heels.

Liebgott’s physical, all rough handling to go along with his sharp features and sharper mouth, and Webster knows what he’s after even before Liebgott’s managed to drag him across the room to the loose privacy of bunks where the others are waiting.

Webster glances across the room which serves as the HQ for Easy White where Lt. Jones and Malarkey talk, framed by the windows (Malarkey, who is not receiving a commission, as it turns out. It had stung Webster to be wrong, but he had set his jaw in response to the look Lt. Jones had shot him. Jones embarrassed because he’s trying to prove himself, too). 

The room reminds Webster of his grandmother’s house. Small and square, beds tucked away in corners. Webster remembers watching the dust motes weave in and out of the sunlight, but the memory fades and all that comes through the windows is the pale wash-out of early afternoon in Haguenau. 

“So,” Liebgott says once everything has been said about Lt. Jones. It’s not much. “What do you know about this patrol thing.” Across the river that divides Haguenau for a prisoner run, Webster’s head fills in. It barely qualifies as a question.

Liebgott’s face is shadowed and Webster wonders how many _angles_ a person can have before he says, “Nothing,” like he can be convincing about it. 

And Liebgott scoffs.

-

It’s harder to sink into the role of an observer when people won’t let him. 

Liebgott and Webster had never been especially close. Webster can’t imagine what it would be like to share a drink with him. He can’t come up with a topic that they would discuss, or any other similarities they have aside from the war and a proficiency in German. 

So it’s strange when Liebgott always happens to be _right there_ , like he’s taken a personal affront to Webster and needs to be at arm’s length to give him shit.

Winters and Nixon have just left the room, leaving the sixteen of them who are now officially on the patrol.

Webster turns the mission over in his head, starting from the first snatches he’d heard from Lipton and Speirs. It will be his first real action since returning to the lines and it’s going to be across a river at 1am under a full moon for a prisoner run. 

Liebgott says, from where he’s lounged on a chair, “A little German?” And then, “He’s as good as I am.”

It continues when Webster heads downstairs to catch Sgt. Martin – who is leading the patrol – to point out, “Sir, there are two translators. We only need 15 men and there are 16 of us.”

Sgt. Martin stares for a long, hard moment and says, “Liebgott?” as Liebgott walks by, “d’you wanna sit this one out?”

Liebgott maintains eye contact with Webster and departs with a smirk and a wink that’s as sharp as any other part of him.

The latter frustrates Webster because, at the right angle, it comes across as volunteering. His self-appointed role in the war is to watch and to write, even if he still lacks the tools, and it won’t be a recount of a layman’s war if he’s volunteering.

-

It comes to a head that night, in the space between being attached to the patrol and 1am, where Liebgott finds him and wraps a hand around Webster’s forearm to jerk him close. Webster had left the room for something he can’t even remember, now caught between latent anger and outright confusion when Liebgott glares at him from half shadows.

“Don’t fuck this up, Web,” Liebgott says.

Webster tells him, voice steadier than he thought it would be: “I won’t.”

“I mean it,” Liebgott says, this time in German. His fingers dig into the heavy fabric of Webster’s jacket, and Webster says, “Ich werde nicht.”

The moment drags and then Liebgott snorts as he shoves Webster away and continues down the hall. Webster watches until the shadows close around him.

-

The patrol results in one casualty and two prisoners.

Jackson dies and Webster accidentally catches Liebgott’s eyes while he’s still crouched over Jackson’s body and he’s grounded when Liebgott looks only slightly steadier than Webster feels. 

Liebgott nods, a scarcely existent up-and-down, and Webster breathes before he draws his shaking hand from where it’s cupped against Jackson’s still-warm cheek. He doesn’t clench his fist, but it’s a close thing. 

Quiet settles in an unsettled and ill-fitting silence, and the only thing that Webster’s aware of is the rough inhale-exhale of the men around him and the sharp, unstable focus on Liebgott’s face. A moment for Jackson. 

-

“He was twenty,” Webster says, later. He wonders what time it is and if dawn is close. He wants the night to be over. His nerves are frayed, but there’s a sense of elation that comes with surviving – the leftover adrenaline that courses through his veins that says, _I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive_.

The high is followed by the low, and Webster says again, “Twenty,” out loud, as if being three years older is by any way significant. 

Across the room, Liebgott makes a noise that could be an agreement or a sign to shut up before he falls silent. 

Webster lets the quiet gather as he stares at his hands. His fingers are long and calloused and his palms are square and flat. Earlier, he had been assembling a detonation device and now he’s cupping shadows. Later, he’ll transcribe the night into whatever notebook he’ll scrounge from somewhere. Webster sets his hands on top of the sheet he’s under, curled on the bed he had claimed (hours) a lifetime ago. The room feels chilly and he’s the only one beneath heaped blankets.

“You did good,” Liebgott says, finally.

Webster exhales and says, “Danke.”


End file.
